I don't know about you but I'm thinking about moving. I mean, Bath is a great place, but there quite a few things missing. There aren't any luxury office blocks with air-conditioning and helipads on the roof. There isn't a convenient airport, and not a shipyard to be found. The water system could be a lot better, and quite frankly, I'm worried about the crime rate.

Where am I moving? A great new place called Sim City 2000. They've got everything you could possibly want there. Plenty of houses, either in high rise apartment blocks or detached homes, acres of office space and just about every conceivable industry, from auto companies and petrochemicals to tourism and media.

There are some great facilities as well. Of a morning I could quite easily take the subway downtown and visit the library, go for a relaxing walk through the zoo and then catch the bus to the ball game.

Of course, the air is pure too. That's because the mayor passed an ordinance requiring that industries comply with strict pollution controls. He raised the finances by legalising gambling which is fine by me. The new super-efficient traffic warden service can be a bit of a pain sometimes, but since the introduction of the excellent train, subway and bus system, I never really need to take the car into town anyway.

The best thing about this city though is that if I don't like anything, I can simply change it. Does that building look a little ugly? Wouldn't you rather have a nice big park there instead of that gas works? OK, send in the bulldozers and down it comes. How come I have the voice that destroys and commands? Er, well I'm the mayor since last week.

That's another great thing. Yesterday the townspeople all gathered together and presented me with a statue, right in the centre of the town. I was so pleased that I immediately allocated funds in next year;s budget to provide a free clinic and I knocked off the one per cent sales tax that everyone had been griping about. So what are you hanging around for? Move in today...

Power mad
The above was a letter I received a few days ago from the bloke who used to live next door. Being a former resident of Sim City, I thought I'd check it out (Sim City 2000 has been built on the ruins of Sim City, which was tragically destroyed by a joint flood, tornado, firestorm and a Godzilla attack some years ago).

It was just as I feared. As a resident of this poor place you are subject to every whim of the sometimes quite power-mad mayor. And the mayor of Sim City 2000 has more power than the old mayor ever had. Now he can level taxes on individual industries when he feels like it, mess around with the education system at the drop of a hat and even terraform the landscape.

I mean, this potentially barking mad despot even decides where the sewer system goes, and if he can raise the necessary cash, he could put you on the front line of fusion energy research...

* That report was a tribute to our special Sim City 2000 corruption correspondent who died tragically in suspicious circumstances. He will be sorely missed. And, on the lighter side, you will now be able to experience the power of running your own 20th century city thanks to a powerful new piece of software from Maxis. The makers claim that you can control virtually everything that a real mayor would.
And now the weather...

Boy, is this giving me a headache. I mean, I've played the original game and enjoyed it lots, but it's child's play compared to the new, improved and amazingly detailed Sim City 2000. But what have Maxis done to make one of the most imaginative, addictive, complex yet simple games even better? The answer is a devil of a lot.

The first, and probably most impressive, part of the new game is the graphics. While in the original make-you-own-city game they were okay and functional, in the year 2000 things are very different.

The lovely isometric 3D viewpoint is much more pleasing to the eye, of courxe, but thanks to interlaced graphics with an increased level of detail you really do get the feeling that you're hovering about over your very own freshly-built city.

But hang on a minute. If the firs game was all about building a city, what can a sequel add on top? The answer is, it doesn't - it adds on underneath instead. Yes, the level of detail and number of options has increased, but we'll get to that later.

The biggest, most interesting new aspect of the game is the subterranean level. Although you won't be using it right away, eventually you'll need to lay a city-wide water system, and then when things really start to pick up, you might even want to build an underground rail system to ease traffic congestion and make it easier for residents to get to work.

TOWERS
Once your mind has grasped the concept of the additions in Sim City 2000, you've then got to mess around with the menus. Thankfully, building up different zones (industrial, commercial and residential) is still the mainstay of the game, but now there are many more things to do, many more objects to place and more problems to work out.

And just as you'd expect, it's all paced, calculated and worked out perfectly to give you all the creative satisfaction you could ever want.

I mean, anyone can build a small city with 2,000 people in it, but then what? Do you start another community at the other side of the level, near the sea maybe? Or do you carry on expanding to unknown heights and the dizzy levels of 10,000 people living under your control?

The game itself is infinite, and will still be as intriguing a hundred years after you've started your city as it was in the early days. (Steady on. - Ed)

SPIRES
And once you've started playing, you'll soon find there's no way you can stop. Theme Park is an excellent example of a game that's accessible to start off with, but has more things to unearth as you go along. Sim City 2000 is exactly the same.

STEEPLE
As you can see from my little demonstration (Mellerstown), you can get a city started within a few hours (all mine took was one intensive afternoon in front of the monitor), deal successfully with all the problems you encounter, and then make your own problems by creating more cities. Problems are always solvable, so you never get frustrated or annoyed. You just have to tax your brain, spend some money and create something.

And thanks to the sheer number of new options, creating something is easy. But instead of simply giving you a list of all the new features, I've explained a couple of the best ones ina little box on these pages.

Everything you'll ever need is in there, somewhere - you just need to find it. As a rule I don't normally enjoy very complex games, and I try to steer away from conquest or god game. But like Theme Park, Sim City 2000 has one major problem: speed. Or, rather, an absence of it.

Even on our A1200 with 8Mb of Fast RAM and a hard disk, the game was painfully slow, sometimes taking a couple of seconds to respond to a mouse click, and the scrolling is terribly sluggish. But as the game is slow-paced and requires patience anyway, I didn't find it too much of a distraction. (Steve did, though). Maxis recommend you play the game on an A4000, but it's hard to imagine many of our readers owning one of those.

Another gripe is the price. Although £40 relates well to console games and this is better than the majority of those, it's still enormously high for a disk based game and hard to justify. I won't mark it down because of that (it's got nothing to with the quality of the game), but I thought it needed saying. (It did. - Ed).

Sim City 2000 has been well received on the PC and Mac and even though the Amiga is clearly struggling to cope with its complexities, I suspect this will be one of those games that just keeps getting played over, and over, and over again.

If I told you that this was the game of the year I wouldn't be lying. But I would be accused of favouritism and elitism. Favouritism because not everyone in the office is into it as much as I am - let's face it Sim City is hardly brimming with nail biting, edge of the seat excitement. And elitism because not everyone has 4Mb RAM and a hard drive on their Amiga A1200.

Yes, you have read the closing words of the last paragraph correctly. Maxis have gone out on a limb and made Sim City 2000 a high spec machine game and to hell with the begrudgers. The reason for this is simple enough: the powers that be insisted that the Amiga conversion reached the same high quality graphics and interface standard as its Mac and PC cousins, and since it only runs properly on high end, all singing and dancing versions of these machines the same was inevitable on the Amiga.

A500 and A600 users can forget about it. Sadly there will never be a version for them. A1200 owners have two options: forget about it too or upgrade. If I were you I'd choose the latter option. If you've been waiting for an excuse to do so I can't think of a better one, and imagine what a difference it will make when using other applications if you've got 2Mb extra RAM and an accelerator in your trapdoor and an Overdrive in the sideslot.

TWILIGHT ZONES
Those familiar with the old top-down viewed Sim City, one of the best selling Sim games of all time, will find the interface and idea similar but vastly improved, You now have an angled side view, where you can see buildings actually being constructed, planes flying around, trains chugging up and down the tracks and little ant-like entities known as cars jamming up the highways.

Getting down to the nitty gritty it's all about planning: zoning land, providing power, water and a transport infrastructure, city services such as police, hospitals, firemen and education and, at a later stage keeping people happy by building beautiful parks and sports stadiums. All of this attracts people, good and bad, rich and poor to your city, who in turn pay taxes and float bonds and allow your metropolitan sprawl to get bigger and bigger.

At the beginning of the game you start out with a landscape which is either automatically created or done so with some help from you. The landscape editor allows you to specify how much dry land, aforestation and water you want and the amount of hills or plains, then, having generated a thing of beauty, you are given the option to mould it further.

This allows you to do large scale landscape gardening and dream up some magnificent cities built high on mountains or on islands. Magnificent maybe, but hardly practical. Still everything's a challenge.

Once you've settled on a landscape it's time to get things going so you zone some of that land for building high or low density industry, residential or commercial buildings. The other two things you need to do immediately is set up a generating station for electricity and put in some roads so that people can get about.

POWER AND ENVIRONMENT
At the beginning of the game you start off with access to water, oil or coal power generation. If you have set up the landscape with plenty of flowing water then the choice is obvious, the only problem being that although they're clean, hydroelectric plants don't provide an awful lot of power and can thus limit expansion.

Most cities start off with the more expensive and pollution contributing coal generator, but it gets the job done and will allow a lot of city expansion before it needs to be supplemented. One point to remember though is that a generator has a life of 50 years before it needs to be replaced so this cost should be built into long term fiscal plans.

Plenty of roads, a good bus service and a train, possibly connected up with a neighbouring town will keep business flowing and at a later stage you can add a subway to your plan. Commercial transport is also very important and if you're right by a large stretch of water then a dock development would be a strikingly good idea. Once again, later on in the game an airport will also become available.

NEW TECHNOLOGY
Where would we be without new technology? The answer in Sim City 2000 is nowhere. As the game progresses the marvels of the future becomes the day to day realities of the present as nuclear power and self contained village towers.

'Arcologys' rear their ugly heads. Of course you could spend your city's whole existence with a nuclear ban in place and with leafy suburbs as the order of the day but you're never going to get rich, and the surrounding Sim Nation towns will outstrip your population may times over.

The level of detail is impressive and apart from sewage and dustbin collecting I don't think Maxis have missed a trick. There is even a military presence, in the form of navy, air force or army bases. If you have a port then the navy will bring extra funds to your city but if you have a nuclear ban in place you'll never get the air force because they like their nuclear weapons, they do.

IMPRESSIVE EH?
Yes, Sim City 2000 is devastatingly impressive. When you start out raw at the beginning it's quite a good idea to have more than a cursory glance at the manual. It's not that you won't pick up the idea by yourself, it's just that there is so much to do that unless you are forewarned the only indications you will have that strings are going wrong are slow growth and messages in the town newspaper that all is not well and the citizens are unhappy.

The City Chronicle is one of the most important aspects of the game and you should ignore its often ridiculous ramblings at your peril. It is a gauge of public opinion and, in general, if you fly in the face of this people will migrate elsewhere.

You can start off at the simplest level back at the beginning of this century with a lot of money or, once you're ready for a real challenge, you can enter at the end of the century when technology exists and you have to move quick to remain competitive.

One way of raising more cash is to issue bonds to the populace. This is expensive but you can't be prudish about borrowing if you're the mayor of a modern city, remember though that ultimately, in order to succeed, you have to pay these bonds back, so you can't squander them. Well, maybe. Actually it's great fun squandering bonds and building massive metropolitan nightmares, your ego swelling along with the city limits.

DISASTER
Then disaster strikes. How about an earthquake? Or an Alien invasion? There is a pop down menu entitled Disasters, any of which can happen to your city unless they are turned off. If you leave the Disaster option on you had better make sure that there's a reasonable fire department in your city and you have a rebuilding fund built in to your long term budget.

And, once you've mastered the game you can relieve the hard work of having to build another city and test out your skills on a number of existing scenarios, cities supplied by Maxis with more trouble on their collective plates than any normal mayor could possibly handle. If you're confident of your skills you can take one of them on and see how well they recover under your nurturing influence.

CONCLUSION
There's no doubt about the thoroughness of this game and its long term lastability. The menus and toolbar can all be opened as individual windows and the amount of information available means that there is never any problem in finding a course of action to take - for right or wrong. Your cities can be as big or small, imaginative or plain, dirty or clean as you please. When you get to a certain size you are rewarded with a mayor's residence and the satisfaction of achieving this is great - but you're still only starting out.

Control by mouse is easy and the quality of the graphics means that you are never in doubt as to what you are doing at any stage. There is plenty of help from fiscal advisers, but you have the ultimate decision on what happens. The zoom function on the toolbar means that you cant take either a tactical, local area view or a strategic view of the direction your city is expanding and moving about is easy with either the centering tool or the scroll bars on the side and bottom of the playing screen.

It's a pity Sim City 2000 isn't available to lower end users - it could be a best seller. But Maxis are banking on the fact that it's good enough to see in droves even so. One word of warning though: on high en machines Sim City 2000 is still slower than its Mac or PC equivalent, unless you have an accelerator as well as extra RAM.

But, in the final analysis, does this really matter? In short no. At the beginning it might be a tad infuriating, but once you actually start really playing the game you get used to it and long term enjoyment, at least until you become an absolute expert, is not effected in the least. You've spent a lot of money on your Amiga. Go on, treat yourself.